Deborah Lee Luskin is the author of Into the Wilderness, a political novel set in Vermont in 1964. She will be joined by Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (D-Windham-9) to talk about what we can learn from this history for navigating current politics at Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main St., Brattleboro, on Tuesday, Sept. 29 at 6:30 p.m. A book signing will follow.
WILLIAMSVILLE-Vermont hasn't always been a majority blue state. For over a century, Vermont was deeply red.
Cracks in Republican hegemony began to in 1958, when Democrat William Meyer was elected to Congress for two years. Four years later, the city of Burlington elected Democrat Phil Hoff for mayor, breaking a 107-year-old tradition of Republican rule.
But the most dramatic example of Vermont shifting blue came in 1964.
The Vermont delegation to the Republican National Convention nominated Margaret Chase Smith, senator from Maine, on the first ballot.
It wasn't the first time Vermont supported Smith. In 1950, Vermont Sen. George Aiken was one of only six Republicans to support the senator's "Declaration of Conscience" speech against McCarthyism, in which she warned her colleagues, "It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques - techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life."
Smith, the first woman to make a presidential run, didn't come close to heading the ticket, but she did refuse to withdraw her name from the ballot, denying Sen. Barry Goldwater a unanimous nomination.
Many Vermont Republicans disapproved of Goldwater but were loath to vote for a Democrat. (Vermont and Maine were the only two states that never supported Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
Two prominent Republicans from southern Vermont, A. Luke Crispe and T. Garry Buckley, had earlier found a work-around by creating the Vermont Independent Party, enabling Vermont Republicans to vote for Lyndon Baines Johnson without casting a Democratic ballot.
The result: LBJ won Vermont with over 66% of the vote. It was the first time in 109 years that Vermonters did not support the Republican presidential candidate.
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The Republican Party was established in 1854 on a platform of abolition, temperance, and women's suffrage, far more socially liberal positions than it now takes. And Vermont's Sen. Aiken was a liberal outlier in the Republican party who supported labor, a minimum wage, federal aid to education, and food assistance - programs now associated with the Democratic party.
But historically, Vermont Democrats had been left out of the electoral process due to "one town, one vote" districting.
With one town, one vote, each town elected a representative to the Vermont State House regardless of population, a system that disenfranchised Vermonters who lived in larger towns.
In the 1960 census, for example, Newfane had a population of 714; Burlington had a population of 35,531. They each had one vote in the Vermont Legislature.
The rural, largely agricultural small towns were mostly Republican, while the state's Democrats generally lived in the manufacturing towns. For a long time, it was nearly impossible for a Democrat to be elected to statewide office and even harder to be sent to Washington, D.C.
But Washington changed that in 1964 with the Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims. Chief Justice Earl Warren famously wrote in his majority opinion that "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests."
The result of this decision for Vermont was summed up in a word: reapportionment.
By the end of 1965, one town, one vote ended. The Vermont House shrank to 150 representatives, each of whom now represents roughly the same number of voters.
This Voices Viewpoint by Deborah Lee Luskin was written for The Commons.
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